SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an essential component of digital marketing. Staying current with the latest SEO trends is crucial for improving your website’s rankings and driving more organic traffic.
SEO trends continually evolve, and businesses that fail to adapt risk falling behind their competitors. From AI-powered search algorithms to the increasing importance of voice search and mobile optimization, there are many SEO trends to watch out for in 2023.
Our post will explore some of the most critical SEO trends and strategies for businesses to implement and stay ahead of the game.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a digital marketing technique that involves optimizing a website’s content, structure, and technical elements to improve its visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords and phrases.
SEO aims to drive more organic (unpaid) traffic to a website, increase brand awareness, and, ultimately, generate more revenue and conversions for a business. SEO encompasses many strategies and tactics, including keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, and technical SEO, all working together to improve a website’s overall search engine performance.
Latest SEO Trends
These tactics have always been crucial throughout the history of SEO, but Google is getting better at analyzing signals and figuring out which content complies with these standards.
Let’s examine what I mean more thoroughly and how you can adhere to those criteria.
- E-E-A-T
The E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) idea is crucial to SEO. Why? Because Google evaluates your site’s credibility using these three factors to give people the best online experience and reliable information.
As of December 2022, Experience has been added to Google’s well-known EAT abbreviation (Expertise, Authority, Trust). When determining the material’s quality, Google will consider the author’s or creator’s experience.
What does the term “experience” actually imply, then? Google wants to know that a content producer has hands-on expertise with the subject under discussion.
An EEAT example is a health website with accurate information on a medical condition written by a reputable physician, citing credible sources and providing a transparent privacy policy, contact information, and positive reviews to establish trustworthiness.
It implies that more websites must pay greater attention to who writes their content and what subjects they write about.
- A.I content & content writing software
The way people engage with online content is changing due to artificial intelligence (AI). Particularly noteworthy is the AI program used by Google. The RankBrain algorithm unveiled a few years ago is crucial to Google’s ranking factors for search engine results page (SERPs) outcomes.
In 2023, the use of AI material is most likely to rise.
There are now more and more marketing applications that combine AI and SEO. And it makes sense, given how much work these integrations can save! Over the past year, most content producers have used one of these AI content generators.
In the recent past, Google released two Helpful Content Updates that were intended to crack down on websites that used AI-generated content. Google has long discouraged websites from using AI-based content. But in the past few years, we’ve discovered that Open AI is used by AI content producers like Jasper and Copy Ai to enable content creation highly scalably.
Can content-writing software be used securely in light of recent Google updates?
Absolutely! Although producing auto-generated drafts is strongly discouraged, marketers can use these tools to expedite their content processes while still producing unique, high-quality content. Here are some of the more beneficial uses for these tools that don’t compromise the uniqueness or humanity of the content:
- Content briefs: Content tools that produce content briefs can aid your authors in understanding the crucial keywords, subjects, and subtopics that should be covered in their original content.
- Content outlines: Without relying on artificial intelligence to do the work for them, content outlines are a great way to offer your writers a roadmap for producing helpful content.
- Content concepts The brainstorming process can be sped up with tools like blog subject generators. It can be challenging to transition from a phrase to a helpful content idea, but using an idea generator can help avoid writer’s block. Here is an example of an automatically generated blog idea that has been altered to reflect better the website’s identity and its younger target audience.
This is just one of many illustrations of how to use content creation software to satisfy better rather than evade Google’s quality standards.
- Audience-Targeted, not Traffic-Target
The proliferation of SEO content creation is one factor in the greater emphasis on experience. However, Google crawlers will become suspicious if a website that offers financial software publishes blog posts with cooking instructions. Does the intended audience of financial software users truly benefit from that content? Or does the website’s position for specific high-volume terms help?
You are aware of the solution. Staying within your general subject and industry areas is crucial for ranking content. In actuality, companies whose content strategy is to merely pursue search traffic without considering what consumers want are unlikely to achieve ranking success in 2023.
Uncertain about the subjects to cover in your content? You can find pertinent industry topics that your target audience is looking for with a content planning tool. When you enter a keyword, the tool will display many semantically similar keywords that people are currently entering into search engines.
- Mobile-Friendliness
Google introduced mobile-first indexing in 2019, which refers to the search engine focusing on a website’s mobile version and treating it as the “primary version” rather than the desktop version. By 2025, nearly 73% of internet users will only access the internet through mobile devices. Google offers a free mobile-friendly test to see your mobile site’s success. Check out Google’s “mobile usability” analysis after that.
Make sure you don’t have a “disallow directive” in place because you need to ensure Google can crawl your URLs for your website to be user-friendly. Be aware that material that requires user interaction, such as clicking or swiping, won’t be loaded by Googlebot. Ensure your PC and mobile sites use the same meta-robot tags.
- Relevant and Helpful Content
Another significant algorithm change affecting how we produce content in 2023 is Google’s August 2022 update on helpful content.
Google has always placed a high priority on providing users with top-notch content throughout its entire existence. The content users focus on in the SERPs should make them feel “satisfied,” according to the new emphasis on “helpful” content.
However, it can be challenging to gauge or evaluate user satisfaction. What exactly does Google intend by “helpful” then? That contains:
- Made with humans in mind, not search algorithms.
- Suitable for the targeted audience.
- Relevant to the website’s key theme or topic.
- Produced by competent, skilled producers.
- Demonstrates a thorough understanding of the subject.
It’s simpler said than done to produce informative content. So how can you improve the value of your content?
First, prioritize quality over quantity. Even though you probably have a lot of goal keywords on your content calendar for 2023, producing a lot of unhelpful, unqualified content will probably not result in top rankings in 2023.
Second, go beyond just looking at search volume in your keyword study. Think about the following:
- What kinds of content appear in specific search results?
- How long is it?
- What queries does it respond to?
- What other subjects or questions is it concerned with?
- Common backlinks that kind of content has?
You can learn a lot about these quality indicators from keyword and content studies, so avoid getting sidetracked by the prospect of just organic traffic.
- Featured Snippet
Featured snippets are text samples that appear at the top of search results pages. These snippets are automatically extracted from sites in Google’s index to respond quickly to users’ search terms.
Featured snippets are your shortcut to place on Google’s first page. They steal organic traffic from rivals on the first page.
Therefore, focus on long-tail keywords and potential query queries that your target market will use to optimize for featured snippets.
- Long-Form Content
Most search engines, notably Google, prioritize high-quality content.
Long reads of 3,000 words or more receive four times as many views and three times as much traffic, according to the SeMrush State of Content Marketing Report. Additionally, they generate 3.5 times as many backlinks as stories, with an average word count of 901 to 1,200.
Although content length doesn’t directly affect ranking, longer content typically performs better in the long run. It is because long-form content offers essential elements Google values, such as depth, sourcing, original study and analysis, and more.
- Core Web Vitals
Three new metrics, called Core Web Vitals by Google. These metrics assess the user experience visitors to your website will have. For this, Google will assess your website’s page experience for improved web browsing by considering your web sites’ loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
Google states that they combine current search signals for page experience with signals from Core Web Vitals.
- Mobile-friendly,
- Secure browsing
- HTTPS, and
- Intrusive pop-up ads.
These signals work together to give Google a complete overview of the page experience. Google has therefore focused more on enhancing user experience. Thus, the dominant search engine will determine whether your website’s pages load quickly enough to retain users on the page.
As a result, Web Vitals allows you to assess how quickly your site loads, becomes fully visible, and is prepared for use. Google employs three test measures for this:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- First Input Delay (FID)
- Cumulative layout shift (CLS.)
Additionally, you need to pay careful attention to these metrics to appear on searches because Google deemed page experience and Core Web Vitals to be ranking factors. The three measures are all related to page speed. It implies you will have trouble appearing on SERPs if your websites load slowly.
- Less CTR
As more users turn to other search engine results page (SERP) features like featured snippets, knowledge graphs, and answer boxes to find immediate answers to their queries without visiting a specific website, organic click-through rates (CTR) are predicted to decrease in 2023.
Because these features provide users instant access to information without requiring them to click through to a website, leading to a decline in website traffic and a need for businesses to adapt their SEO strategies accordingly.
As a result, even if a website ranks high in organic search results, its CTR may be lower than in the past, as users are more likely to find the information they need from these other SERP features.
Therefore, businesses need to optimize their content to appear in these other features and rank high in organic search results to maintain their online visibility and attract traffic to their website.
- Image Optimization
Image optimization is an SEO trend that involves optimizing images on a website to improve its overall search engine ranking.
It includes compressing image sizes for faster loading, adding descriptive alt text and file names to improve accessibility and context for search engines, and implementing structured data markup to provide additional information about the image.
With the increasing importance of visual content in online marketing, optimizing images can help businesses attract more organic traffic, improve user experience, and ultimately increase conversion rates. As a result, businesses need to prioritize image optimization as part of their overall SEO strategy in 2023.
Benefits of SEO
Implementing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques can bring numerous benefits to a business.
Website Visibility
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps increase the website’s visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) by optimizing various aspects of a website’s content, structure, and technical elements.
By conducting keyword research and implementing relevant keywords and phrases throughout a website’s content, search engines can better understand what the site is about and match it with relevant user search queries.
Improving a website’s technical SEO, such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, and SSL certification can boost its ranking on SERPs. Optimizing on-page elements such as meta descriptions, title tags, and headers can make it easier for search engines to crawl and index a site’s pages. Higher search engine rankings ultimately mean increased website visibility and exposure, leading to more potential clicks, traffic, and conversions.
Establish Credibility and Authority
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can help businesses establish credibility and authority within their industry by improving their website’s rankings. A higher search engine ranking is often perceived as a sign of relevance and expertise, which can increase trust and credibility among potential customers.
SEO strategies such as link building, content marketing, and social media promotion can help businesses establish themselves as thought leaders within their industry and build a loyal following of customers and fans.
By consistently creating high-quality content and providing valuable information to their audience, businesses can demonstrate their expertise and position themselves as an authority within their field. It can increase brand recognition and customer loyalty and improve search engine rankings. Ultimately, SEO can help businesses establish credibility and authority in their industry, increasing brand awareness and customer acquisition.
Higher ROI
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can provide a higher return on investment (ROI) than traditional advertising because it targets users actively searching for products or services related to a business. By optimizing a website’s content and structure for relevant keywords, businesses can attract more organic (unpaid) traffic to their site, resulting in more potential leads and conversions.
Unlike traditional advertising, which often relies on interruptive and expensive methods such as TV commercials or billboards, SEO provides a cost-effective way to reach a targeted audience already interested in a business’s products or services.
Additionally, SEO provides long-term benefits, as a website with a high search engine ranking can continue attracting organic traffic for months or even years without additional advertising costs. Therefore, it can result in a higher ROI over time than traditional advertising methods. Overall, implementing SEO strategies can help businesses achieve a higher ROI by targeting a specific audience and providing long-term benefits without the need for ongoing advertising costs.
